1. Technical Field
The presently disclosed embodiments are directed to managing document interactions in a collaborative document environment of a virtual environment.
2. Brief Discussion of Related Art
Documents, as states of knowledge, play a significant role in enterprise collaboration. Traditional document management systems primarily support an individual user interacting with a collection of documents, such as content authoring, navigation/browsing, access control, tagging, versioning, etc. In the past several years, there has been a strong trend to embrace collaborative Web 2.0 technologies (e.g. wiki, blogs, social community, instant messaging (IM), voice over IP, video streaming) in document management systems to support some sort of synchronous or asynchronous collaboration in virtual workspaces.
However, these web 2.0 enabled collaborations are primarily centered on the evolution of the content (i.e. text, image, video, audio), and typically neglect some important aspects of human interaction (e.g. social and/or visual cues). For instance, remote participants in web conferencing or online learning may not be fully immersed in the experience and as a result, the participants can feel less engaged or less productive than if the participants were together in a conference room or a lecture hall. Furthermore, there is typically little support for direct social interactions among participants in existing document management systems, beyond instant messaging or voice communication. Although telepresence and video conferencing technologies are evolving rapidly, they typically do not fully address collaborations around content repositories or document content.